Digital Object Identifiers and the Next Generation of Legal Scholarship

The use of digital object identifiers (DOIs) in academic publishing has become so pervasive that robust, data-driven services using the DOI as the centerpiece of connectivity have been developed and integrated into the publication process. In fact, DOIs have become so commonplace that many services, ranging from academic social media platforms for individual scholars to proprietary products aimed at university administrators, expect most, if not all, scholarship to be tracked using a DOI.

In the academic legal community, the use of digital identifiers has not yet become pervasive, which means the academic legal community is not currently reaping the many benefits DOIs offer and that the academic legal community will be left out of future developments and innovations in generating and measuring impact data from scholarship. This project seeks to understand the current landscape of the use of persistent identifiers in the legal academic community (or lack thereof), identify potential barriers this community experiences regarding the implementation and widespread adoption of DOIs, as well as provide an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and legal publication organizations such as law reviews for other similarly-situated entities to follow as a guide.

In addition to the white paper, this project will result in a call to action and a usable toolkit for all law schools and law libraries to follow our example and implement DOI registration in their publication process.

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